Violence? In the Beholder's Eye

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: May 13, 1990

This is the Age of the Adjective. That is, for people who write about the more eccentric new movies and for those who, having paid good money to see them, try to figure out what they've been looking at, and frequently why.

When in extremity, one can always resort to the one-word review. It short-cuts thinking about movies that are often as disorienting as they are entertaining:

Toward the end of Uli Edel's ''Last Exit to Brooklyn,'' Tralala (in a fine performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh), an exhausted tart possibly still in her teens, gets crazy-drunk in a waterfront bar. She opens her blouse and invites the boys to admire her breasts, which, with more hope than certainty, she describes as the best in the Western world.

The boys don't need urging, and Tral doesn't have to be coaxed. In no time, she's across the street in a vacant lot, in the back seat of a decaying automobile, the uncomprehending victim of a brutal gang-rape. Sorrowful or merely sordid? Peter Greenaway's richly decorated ''Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,'' in which the costumes could have been borrowed from an aggressively avant-garde production of ''Measure for Measure,'' starts off with a man being stripped of his clothes by gangsters, who then smear his body with excrement. The job being done, one fastidious goon calls for soap and water to wash his hands. He's about to enter a restaurant to enjoy a gourmet meal.

Somewhat later in the film, the thief of the title takes revenge on his wife's lover, who is ''cataloguing French history,'' by stuffing the victim's mouth, throat and windpipe with the pages of his books. Says one of the murderers to a pal, ''The French Revolution was easier to swallow than Napoleon.'' Witty? Witless? Cautionary? John McNaughton's ''Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer'' opens with a montage of some of Henry's victims, a nude woman staring into space from a pastoral hiding place, what appear to be the shotgunned remains of a salesman and a customer in a liquor store, another woman who seems to have a Coke bottle jammed into her mouth.

The movie has a serious manner in that it keeps its distance from Henry, a drifter who looks a little like Arnold Schwarzenegger before he pumped iron. The movie never pretends to enter his mind. Henry's murders are presented as random and joyless. This is not a slasher show.

The movie attends to Henry in such a way that it appears to invite the audience to see him as some kind of symptom of our time. Then, suddenly, it loses its cool. Henry introduces Otis, a fellow floater though somewhat more dimwitted, to the satisfactions of motiveless homicide. One night when he and Otis are looking for something to do, Henry kills the two prostitutes they have picked up in downtown Chicago. At first Otis is worried. The usually laconic Henry becomes voluble:

''You mean to tell me you never killed nobody before? Open your eyes, Otis. It's either you or them.'' Which is pretty much the substance of the movie. Powerful? Sadistic? Who needs it?

How one responds to these three films is not easily predictable. Disgust and exaltation are much like laughter. One experiences the reaction, then attempts to analyze it, looking to justify the response. The response, having been justified, becomes theoretically rational. What makes these films significant is that, though seriously intended, each has, to a greater or lesser degree, provoked outrage far exceeding the response to such other films as ''Miami Blues,'' ''Blue Steel'' and the recent ''Internal Affairs,'' each a conventional melodrama in which degradation and physical violence are far more explicit and more lightly treated.

If the police films, as well as television's prime-time cop series, frequently seem good fun, they also are even more dehumanizing. The violence is in the service of what is essentially throwaway entertainment. Nobody takes it too seriously. One hardly notices it.

Such entertainment imagines a world without dangerous (to the audience) consequences.

Consider ''Miami Blues,'' which was directed by George Armitage but demonstrates a lot of the idiosyncratic humor of Jonathan Demme, the director who functioned as the producer of the film.

As it entertains, ''Miami Blues'' disarms the criticism it theoretically deserves. It is a witty, raffish policier about an aging, hard-nosed detective (Fred Ward) trying to bring to heel a most personable, smiling young murderer-con artist, played by Alec Baldwin, who is this year's new overnight movie star. Caught between the two men is a sweet-tempered hooker (Jennifer Jason Leigh, again excellent) who'd like to believe that her killer-lover is really Prince Charming.

The movie has the airy touch of a screwball comedy. At one point Mr. Baldwin's frisky killer steals the detective's gun, badge and false teeth, which causes the policeman no end of embarrassment.